Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

ThinkSecret is reporting that Apple is revising the QuickTime APIs in Leopard:

A new Application Programming Interface (API) for video, which may feature a “Core” moniker akin to Apple’s Core Image, Core Audio, and Core Animation components, will deliver most of the improvements to QuickTime. While QuickTime from a end-users perspective is not expected to undergo any substantial improvements, the new API will take years of legacy QuickTime code and replace it with a more modern and efficient architecture to deliver improved performance and maintainability.

This is long, long overdue. If I ever get around to writing my API Design book, I was planning to use QuickTime as a classic example of how not to design an API. Now if only they’d rev QuickTime for Java too.

Well isn’t this interesting. Details are slim, and this may yet prove to be false, but first reports are that Apple seems to be accessing users’ AppleTVs without notice or permission to disable user installed software and cripple the devices the users’ purchased. If I wasn’t already convinced I wasn’t going to buy an AppleTV, this would do it. Frankly, if this proves to be true, it will make me think twice about buying Macs.

When are manufacturers get it through their thick skulls that they do not own the machine after the customer hands over the cash and takes it out of the store?

Can someone please explain to me just what the excitement about the Apple TV is all about? Personally this seems like such a crippled useless, product I can’t believe any sane individual would pay $99 for it, much less $299. Is this just the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field at work or is there something I’m missing?

Near as I can tell the AppleTV does nothing but beam videos from my Mac to my TV, except it doesn’t work with any video I actually have on my computer. It only works with videos I purchase from the iTunes music store. Possibly it also works with QuickTime videos from other publishers (I’m not sure about that) but all the AVI files I’ve downloaded? It won’t play a one of them unless maybe I’m willing to crack open the box, void my warranty, and hack it. And even if it would play all the videos I actually own, I still don’t think I could talk myself into paying more than about $49 for it. It’s just a funky network adapter when you get down to it.

If you threw in a DVD player, a TV tuner, and/or a DVR it would get a little better. I’d love an Apple designed settop box that could replace the hideous Scientific Atlanta boxes I have now, but the AppleTV just isn’t that. It’s just one more box next to my TV to do something I don’t have any particualr reason to do. As is, this is like paying $299 for a cable box that plays nothing but pay-per-view. What exactly is the point here?

I’m about 99% certain that the various problems I’ve been having on my main desktop Mac lately can all be traced to a misbehaving LaCie d2 external hard drive. (I leave 1% open for the possibility it’s the FireWire cable or controller, but I really don’t think so.)

Partially I blame LaCie for this, and perhaps EMC, but mostly I blame Apple. There is no excuse for allowing a misbehaving external hard drive, from which I have not booted, to affect the operation of the rest of the system. Mac OS X should be robust against any signal, valid or otherwise, from external devices. It should be equally prepared to handle the case where a device does not respond within the expected time frame.
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Mostly the Migration Assistant in Mac OS X works, but there are some surprising things that don’t come across and have to be reinstalled manually. So far I’ve noticed:
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I spent yesterday rebuilding and repairing my main desktop Mac. Fingers crossed. It may be fixed now. It seems to have had some pretty serious volume structure problems on the main disk. The Finder kept hanging, and every time I did something that touched every file on the disk (like backing up) the process would hang. I had to boot off another disk to fix it, which meant I had to find my Tiger DVD and remember some old passwords. And then there was lot of time waiting around while files copied, Tiger installed, and TechTool tried to repair things. In any case it was quite boring and not very productive. I did catch up on my comic books though.
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